War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  TWO

  The Dogs of War

  The Prevalence and Importance of War

  As we have seen, many recent popular and academic views of precivilized warfare agree that it was a trivial and insubstantial activity. Proponents of primitive war and the pacified past claim or imply that peaceful societies were common, fighting was infrequent, and active participation in combat was limited among nonstate peoples until they either evolved into or made contact with states and civilizations.

  If these views are correct, they should be supported by broad surveys of ethnographic and archaeological evidence. Ethnographic data should indicate that nonstate societies were commonly pacifistic, resorted to combat much less frequently than did ancient or modern states, and mobilized little of their potential manpower for the warfare they did conduct. In the more thoroughly studied regions, archaeology should recover very little evidence of violent conflicts before the development of indigenous states or the intrusion of foreign states. As we shall see, on the contrary, the available evidence shows that peaceful societies have been very rare, that warfare was extremely frequent in nonstate societies, and that tribal societies often mobilized for combat very high percentages of their total manpower.

  LEVELS OF SOCIAL COMPLEXITY

  Before proceeding with any ethnographic survey, we must review some terms that are used by anthropologists in roughly classifying the size and complexity of societies. These terms include bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, and civilized or urban states. They loosely describe the population size and the economic and political complexity of various societies.

  Bands are small, politically autonomous groups of twenty to fifty people with an informal headman. They usually consist of a few related extended families who reside or move together. Typically, bands are hunter-gatherers or foragers. Several such micro-bands usually congregate for a few weeks each year into a macro-band of several hundred people for ceremonies, festivities, courting and marriage arrangements, and the exchange of goods. Such macro-bands usually speak a distinct dialect and are sometimes referred to as dialect tribes. The classic examples of societies with band organization are the Eskimo of the central Arctic, the Paiutes of the American Great Basin, and the Aborigines of central Australia.

  The term tribe covers a multitude of social and political organizations. Tribes generally incorporate a few thousand people into a single social organization via pan-tribal associations. These associations are usually kin groups that trace descent to a common hypothetical or mythological ancestor. But nonkin associations, such as age-grades (groups of young men who were initiated together) and sodalities (voluntary nonkin associations such as dance societies, clubs, etc.), can also integrate a tribe. Tribes are collections of such associations or kin groups that unite for war. While tribal leaders may be called big men or chiefs, they are not formal full-time political officials, and they usually exercise influence rather than what we would call power. In most cases, there is no central political organization except informal councils of “elders” or local chiefs. Foraging, pastoral, and agricultural economies are all found among tribes. Tribes are so various in their features that it is difficult to list classic cases, but the Indian tribes of the Plains, the southwestern Pueblos, and the Masai of East Africa are familiar examples.

  Chiefdoms are organizations that unite many thousands or tens of thousands of people under formal, full-time political leadership. The populace of a chiefdom is usually divided into hereditary ranks or incipient social classes, often consisting of no more than a small chiefly or noble class and a large body of commoners. Both the means of production and economic surpluses are concentrated under the control of the chief, who redistributes them. A central political structure integrates many local communities. This central body may consist of a council of chiefs, but in most cases a single head chief controls a hierarchy of lesser chiefs. Accession to chiefship is hereditary, permanent, and justified on religious or magical grounds. But a chief, unlike a king, does not have the power to coerce people into obedience physically; instead, he must rely on magical and economic powers to enforce his dictates. Some typical examples, ranging from weak to strong chiefdoms, include some Pacific Northwest Coast tribes, many Polynesian societies, early medieval Scottish clans, and some traditional petty kingdoms in central Africa.

  States are also political organizations that incorporate many tens or hundreds of thousands of people from numerous communities into a single territorial unit. They have a central government empowered to collect taxes, draft labor for public works or war, decree laws, and physically enforce those laws. Essentially, states are class-stratified political units that maintain a “monopoly of deadly force”—a monopoly institutionalized as permanent police and military forces. Civilized states are simply those with cities and some form of record keeping (usually writing). Since few people in the world today are not citizens of some state, examples are unnecessary.

  The term primitive, when used in its usual sense in anthropology, merely refers to a technological condition—that of using preindustrial or preliterate technology. In social terms, primitive refers to societies that are not urban or literate. Precisely such societies are the traditional subject matter of anthropology. But because the word has negative connotations in everyday speech, primitive has fallen out of favor. It has been erratically replaced by a number of inelegant neologisms such as preliterate or nonliterate, prestate or nonstate, preindustrial and small-scale. The term tribal societies usually encompasses bands, tribes, and weak chiefdoms but excludes strong chiefdoms and states. In the broadest sense, all these terms refer to societies that are simpler in technology and some aspects of social organization—and usually smaller in size—than societies that have produced historical records. Primarily for stylistic variety, all these terms are used interchangeably here.

  IS WARFARE UNIVERSAL?

  According to the most extreme views, war is an inherent feature of human existence, a constant curse of all social life, or (in the guise of real war) a perversion of human sociability created by the centralized political structures of states and civilizations. In fact, cross-cultural research on warfare has established that although some societies that did not engage in war or did so extremely rarely, the overwhelming majority of known societies (90 to 95 percent) have been involved in this activity.

  Three independent cross-cultural surveys of representative samples of recent tribal and state societies from around the world have tabulated data on armed conflict, all giving very consistent results. In one sample of fifty societies, only five were found to have engaged “infrequently or never” in any type of offensive or defensive warfare.1 Four of these groups had recently been driven by warfare into isolated refuges, and this isolation protected them from further conflict. Such groups might more accurately be classified as defeated refugees than as pacifists. One California Indian tribe, the Monachi of the Sierra Nevada, apparently did occasionally go to war, but only very rarely. The results of this particular survey indicate that 90 percent of the cultures in the sample unequivocally engaged in warfare and that the remaining 10 percent were not total strangers to violent conflict.

  In another larger cross-cultural study of politics and conflict, twelve of a sample of ninety societies (13 percent) were found to engage in warfare “rarely or never.”2 Six of these twelve were tribal or ethnic minorities that had long been subject to the peaceful administration of modern nation-states—for example, the Gonds of India and the Lapps of Scandinavia. Three were agricultural tribes living in geographically isolated circumstances, such as the Tikopia islanders of Polynesia (who were defeated refugees) and the Cayapa tribe of Ecuador.3 The final three were nomadic hunter-gatherers of the equatorial jungles and arctic tundra: the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, the Semang of Malaysia, and the Copper Eskimo of arctic Canada. Most of these peaceful societies were recently defeated refugees living in isolation, lived under a “king’s peace” enforced by a modern state, or both. The real exceptions, r
epresenting only 5 percent of the sample, were some small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers and a few isolated horticultural tribes.

  In a study of western North American Indian tribes and bands, again only 13 percent of the 157 groups surveyed were recorded as “never or rarely” raiding or having been raided—meaning, in this case, more than once a year.4 Of these 21 relatively peaceable groups, 14 gave other evidence of having conducted or resisted occasional raids, presumably only once every few years. This leaves only 7 truly peaceful societies (4.5 percent of the sample) that apparently did not participate in any type of warfare or raiding. All these were very small nomadic bands residing in the driest, most isolated regions of the Columbia Plateau and the Great Basin.5 Again, we find the most peaceful groups living in areas with extremely low population densities, isolated by distance and hard country from other groups.

  Even highly nomadic, geographically isolated hunter-gatherers with low population densities are not universally peaceable. For example, many Australian Aboriginal foragers, including those living in deserts, were inveterate raiders.6 The seeming peacefulness of such small hunter-gatherer groups may therefore be more a consequence of the tiny size of their social units and the large scale implied by our normal definition of warfare than of any real pacifism on their part. Under circumstances where the sovereign social and political unit is a nuclear or slightly extended family band of from four to twenty-five people, even with a sex ratio unbalanced in favor of males, no more than a handful of adult males (the only potential “warriors”) are available. When such a small group of men commits violence against another band or family, even if faced in open combat by all the men of the other group, this activity is not called war but is usually referred to as feuding, vendetta, or just murder.

  Thus many small-band societies that are regarded by ethnologists as not engaging in warfare instead evidence very high homicide rates.7 For example, the Kung San (or Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert are viewed as a very peaceful society; indeed, one popular ethnography on them was titled The Harmless People. However, their homicide rate from 1920 to 1955 was four times that of the United States and twenty to eighty times that of major industrial nations during the 1950s and 1960s. Before local establishment of the Bechuanaland/Botswana police, the Kung also conducted small-scale raids and prolonged feuds between bands and against Tswana herders intruding from the east. The Copper Eskimo, who appear as a peaceful society in the cross-cultural surveys just discussed, also experienced a high level of feuding and homicide before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police suppressed it. Moreover, in one Copper Eskimo camp of fifteen families first contacted early in this century, every adult male had been involved in a homicide. Other Eskimo of the high arctic who were organized into small bands also fit this pattern. Based on figures from different sources, the murder rate for the Netsilik Eskimo, even after the Mounties had suppressed interband feuding, exceeds that of the United States by four times and that of modern European states by some fifteen to forty times. At the other end of the New World, the isolated Yaghan “canoe nomads” of Tierra del Fuego, whose only sovereign political unit was the “biological family,” had a murder rate in the late nineteenth century “10 times as high as that of the United States.”8 Thus armed conflict between social units does not necessarily disappear at the lowest levels of social integration; often it is just terminologically disguised as feuding or homicide.

  Both Richard Lee and Marvin Harris, defending the pacifistic nature of Kung and other simple societies compared with our own, decry the “semantic deception” that disguises the “true” homicide rates of modern states by ignoring the murders inflicted during wars.9 Let us undertake such a comparison for one simple society, the Gebusi of New Guinea. Calculations show that the United States military would have had to kill nearly the whole population of South Vietnam during its nine-year involvement there, in addition to its internal homicide rate, to equal the homicide rate of the Gebusi.10 As their ethnographer Bruce Knauft notes, “Only the most extreme instances of modern mass slaughter would equal or surpass the Gebusi homicide rate over a period of several decades.”11 There is, then, an equal semantic deception involved in manufacturing peaceful societies out of violent ones by refusing to characterize as war their only possible form of intergroup violence, merely because of the small size of the contending social units.

  If many of the “peaceful” hunter-gatherer bands did in reality engage in armed conflict, were any of them genuine pacifists? Perhaps the most striking case of peaceful hunters involves the Polar Eskimo of northwestern Greenland.12 In the early nineteenth century, they consisted of a small band of some 200 people whose circumstances seemed ideally suited to a postapocalyptic science-fiction plot or perhaps a heartless social science experiment. Their icy isolation had been so complete for so long that they were unaware that any other people existed in the world until they were contacted in 1819 by a European explorer. This tiny society, whose members eked a precarious livelihood from a frozen desert, not surprisingly avoided all feuds and armed conflicts, although murder was not unknown.13 When other Eskimo from Canada and southwestern Greenland reached them after hearing of their existence from Europeans, relations with these strangers and with the Europeans they encountered were always quite amicable. The Polar Eskimo thus provide a counterexample to the recent theory that contact with Western civilization and its material goods inevitably turns peaceful tribesmen into Hobbesian berserkers.

  There are a few other examples of peaceful hunter-gatherers.14 The Mbuti Pygmies and Semang of the tropical forests of central Africa and Malaysia seem to have completely eschewed any form of violent conflict and can legitimately be regarded as pacifistic. However, the Pygmy foragers were in fact politically subordinate to and economically dependent on the farmers who surrounded them (Chapter 9). Although they frequently engaged in nonlethal violence involving weapons, the last small “wild” band of Aborigines in the western Australian desert, the Mardudjara, never (at least while ethnographers were present) permitted such fighting to escalate into killing. Although they possessed shields and specialized fighting weapons, the Mardudjara had no words in their language for feuds or warfare. The Great Basin Shoshone and Paiute bands mentioned earlier apparently never attacked others and were themselves attacked only very rarely; most just fled rather than trying to defend themselves. But these few peaceful groups are exceptional. The cross-cultural samples indicate that the vast majority of other hunter-gatherer groups did engage in warfare and that there is nothing inherently peaceful about hunting-gathering or band society.15

  Pacifistic societies also occur (if uncommonly) at every level of social and economic complexity. Truly peaceful agriculturalists appear to be somewhat less common than pacifistic hunter-gatherers. In the cross-cultural samples discussed earlier, almost all the peaceful agricultural groups could be characterized as defeated refugees, ethnic minorities long administered by states, or tribes previously pacified by the police or by paramilitary organs of colonial or national states.16 Low-density, nomadic hunter-gatherers, with their few (and portable) possessions, large territories, and few fixed resources or constructed facilities, had the option of fleeing conflict and raiding parties. At best, the only thing they would lose by such flight was their composure. But with their small territories, relatively numerous possessions, immobile and labor-expensive houses, food stores, and fields, sedentary farmers or hunter-gatherers who attempted to flee trouble could lose everything and thereupon risk starvation. Farmers and sedentary hunter-gatherers had little alternative but to meet force with force or, after injury, to discourage further depredations by taking revenge. Groups that depended on very localized, essential resources—such as desert springs, patches of fertile soil, good pastures, or fishing stations—had to defend these or face severe privation. Even nomadic pastoralists in extensive grasslands had to defend their herds, wherever they might be. For obvious reasons, then, agriculturalists, pastoralists, and less nomadic foragers have seldom been
entirely peaceful. But such pacifistic farmers have occasionally appeared.

  The best-known peaceful agriculturalists are the Semai of Malaysia, who strictly tabooed any form of violence (although their homicide rate was numerically significant).17 Their reaction to any use of force involved “passivity or flight.” Interestingly, they were recruited as counterinsurgency scout troops by the British during the Communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s. The Semai recruits were profoundly shocked to discover that as soldiers they were expected to kill other men. But after the guerrillas killed some of their kinsmen, they became very enthusiastic warriors. One Semai veteran recalled, “We killed, killed, killed. The Malays would stop and go through people’s pockets and take their watches and money. We did not think of watches or money. We thought only of killing. Wah, truly we were drunk with blood.” However, when the Semai scouts were demobilized and returned to their villages, they quietly resumed their nonviolent life-style. The low density of population, shifting settlement, and abundances of unused land probably allowed the Semai, unlike many other farmers, the option of flight from violent threats.18 But their strong moral distaste for violence was undoubtedly important in maintaining their peacefulness.

  Peaceful societies even exist among industrial states. For example, neither Sweden nor Switzerland has engaged in warfare for nearly two centuries; their homicide rates are among the lowest in the world. Like many peaceful tribal societies, Switzerland is to some degree geographically isolated behind its mountains. Sweden was once home to the legendarily belligerent Vikings and remained one of the most warlike societies in Europe until the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Sweden has fought no wars since 1815. Both nations traditionally maintain modern military forces; indeed, every Swiss male between the ages of twenty and fifty is a military reservist, while Sweden is one of the world’s leading arms exporters. But they and a few other nations in Asia and South America offer testimony that there is nothing inherently warlike about states.